“I am willing,” Daubier said with effort, “to do whatever I can to aid in unraveling this tangle, Monsieur. I will come with you peaceably—wherever you wish me to go. For the Republic.”

It was a fine sentiment. It had no impact on Delaroche. “You will come as I wish you to come,” he said sharply. “Like the traitor you are.”

Jaouen let out a short, irritated breath. “One can’t be too careful in dealing with the First Consul’s chosen portraitist. Why don’t we send to my cousin and see what he thinks of these proceedings?”

“Who do you think sent me?” Reaching into his coat, Delaroche withdrew a rectangular piece of paper. Shaking it free of its folds, he jiggled it in front of his host. “This is out of your jurisdiction, Jaouen.”

Laura was too far away to make out any words. She could see only the imprint of a very official-looking seal. But whatever it was, it had the desired effect.

Jaouen stepped back. “My mistake.” He shrugged. “I had thought this was merely your whim, Gaston. But in this case”—he extended an arm towards Daubier—“your prisoner, I believe.”

How could he sound so completely indifferent? Everyone knew what happened to men in the Temple. Jaouen knew better than most.

Daubier gave him a sickly smile. “It is quite all right, André. An innocent man has nothing to fear.”

They all knew that wasn’t true.

Laura watched as Daubier meekly held out his hands to be bound. She had been away in England throughout the Terror, but she felt, for the first time, that she had an inkling of what she had escaped. The fear. The uncertainty. The helplessness.

But Daubier wasn’t helpless. Laura caught at scraps. Daubier was said to be a favorite of the First Consul’s wife; he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the First Consul himself. Surely they would intervene on his behalf.

Or not.

That hadn’t saved Topino-Lebrun four years back. She had read about it even in England, the painter condemned for his supposed role in the Conspiracy of Daggers.

She looked at Jaouen, but the man with whom she had bantered about bedsheets, Daubier’s chess partner, Gabrielle and Pierre-André’s father, was gone. He was expressionless, emotionless, all indifference and cold intellect behind the icy lenses of his spectacles. He might never have joked with Daubier or called him friend.

Laura remembered that whispered conversation in the green marble antechamber. Had Jaouen conspired with him only to draw him on? Had it all been an elaborate trap? The exchange with Delaroche had lacked conviction, almost as though he were speaking lines set out long ago.

Had they concocted it between them, Delaroche and Jaouen? The supposed enmity, the chance meeting on the bridge . . . It might all be a blind.

But no. That made no sense. Why put on a show for her? She was only the governess. Jaouen hadn’t known, then, that she had any connection to Daubier. She was thinking herself into circles, as tangled as the rope around Daubier’s wrists.

Laura backed away, her gray skirts whispering against her legs, fading into the crowd. They would need some sort of proof, she imagined, even in this new regime. There would be at least the semblance of a trial, as there had been in the Topino case. They might torture a confession out of him, but they would have a much more difficult time of it if they couldn’t find physical evidence—letters, instructions, autographed pictures of the Comte d’Artois.

Laura took a sharp left, into the servants’ passageway that ran along the side of the house. They had been speaking of Daubier’s studio earlier, she and Jaouen. Daubier’s life was conducted out of that studio. If there were anything to incriminate him, it would be there.

Laura’s steps quickened until she was all but running down the hallway. Whatever else happened, she was determined that Delaroche’s men would not find what they were looking for. That painting with the finch might have been a very long time ago, but she owed him something still, if only for offering to take her in when he no more wanted a daughter than she did a father.

The memory of that conversation almost made her stumble. He had tried to warn her against Jaouen. Had he suspected the other man of double-dealing with him? Or had it been on general principles only?

Jeannette had left her cloak by the back entrance, that same entrance to which Jean had directed Laura on that first rainy day a few millennia ago. It was a country woman’s garment—a thick, solid piece of wool held by a tie at the neck, with a deep hood attached—a far cry from the fitted pelisse required by fashion. It also concealed far more.

Laura caught it up gratefully. With her plain dress and the heavy wool cloak, she looked like someone’s maid. A superior sort of maid, perhaps, but not the sort of person anyone would question. Domestics came and went as they would.

The Place Royale was only four streets away, but it had never felt farther. The shops were long since closed, their shutters drawn, their awnings rolled up. The streets were deserted, illuminated only by the odd light from someone’s windows. Laura forced herself to make her way with deliberation; she’d be no good to anyone if she slipped and fell in the ice-slick mud limning the unpaved streets. But every instinct urged haste.

Keeping close to the shadows beneath the loggia that lined the four sides of the Place Royale, Laura conjured the plan of Daubier’s apartment in her memory. It had been simple enough, she recalled. There was a narrow entry hall followed by the studio, a large square room with windows on both sides. Beyond the studio lay his private apartments, all in a row: dining room, drawing room, study, and bedroom. Daubier had let her nap in his bed during some of those interminable parties of her youth. There had been a second stairway, leading out from the bedroom, presumably to a servants’ entrance.

The concierge was napping at his post, his lantern half-shuttered beside him, the crumbs of his dinner in his lap. Laura slipped past him without a word.

She scurried up the broad, shallow stairs, past the first two flats. All was quiet. It must be near midnight now, late enough for the good inhabitants of the building to be asleep or engaged in other activities behind closed doors and drawn bedcurtains.

Daubier’s flat was the third, four stories up. By the time she reached the landing, Laura was breathless with exertion and nerves. By now, Delaroche would have Daubier in a carriage. They might even now be entering the precincts of the Temple. How long before they sent someone to search Daubier’s lodgings?

They might wait until morning.

She couldn’t count on that sort of luck.

Laura tentatively twisted the knob. It turned smoothly, without sticking. Laura’s face twisted into something that was half grimace, half smile. Daubier never remembered to lock his door. There was, he had liked to say, nothing worth stealing.

It was clever, Laura acknowledged. Clever to hide something treasonous in plain sight, someplace with no locks or bars. Who would think to look where everyone was invited to go?

The first room of the apartment was a narrow, rectangular entry hall. It was windowless, darker than night without a candle, but Laura could navigate it by touch. Nothing had changed. There was still the same long, narrow wooden table at the center, the same seventeenth-century bench by the far wall. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out the shadowy outlines of the paintings on the walls. Daubier had always used this space to exhibit the work of his pupils, a generous touch.

Did Julie Beniet’s work hang here? No doubt. It was too dark to be sure.

The door to the studio was closed, but a fine line of light showed beneath it. That was like Daubier, too, to leave the candles burning against his return. He had always been careless with such things, burning money as quickly as he earned. He was lucky, Laura’s mother used to say, that he hadn’t burned the building down as well.

It was disconcerting, all these memories. People, words, conversations she hadn’t thought about for years were flooding back, dogging her steps through the entryway.

Laura yanked at the door of the studio, tearing it open with a force that made the muscles in her shoulder cry out in protest. There were candles burning in all the sconces, dripping wax into the specially designed basins below. It looked almost exactly as she remembered it—props strewn about in careless profusion, a half-finished canvas on an easel, another propped against a wall. The platform at the far end of the room, cluttered with a dizzying selection of drapes and backdrops. Daubier’s paints and brushes, the one exception to his glorious untidiness, lined with meticulous care on their respective stands. And from their perch in an elaborate filigree cage, Daubier’s birds still sang.

It might have been the studio of Laura’s youth but for one thing. There was a man on the platform, stretched out full-length on the chaise longue. In contrast to the elaborate brocade throw, he was wearing street clothes, an expensive but otherwise mundane jacket and breeches.

He scrambled to his feet as Laura entered, sending the pamphlet he had been reading skidding to the floor.

“Hullo,” he said rapidly. “If you’re looking for the artist, I’m afraid he’s out—oh.” He broke off abruptly as Laura pushed back her hood. “I’ve met you, haven’t I?”

He had. He had bumped into her in Jaouen’s study, weeks ago.

What was Jaouen’s cousin Philippe doing in Daubier’s studio?

This night kept getting stranger and stranger. Laura scrambled to make sense of it. If Jaouen had drawn Daubier into a trap, the cousin might be in on it too, put there in the studio as security to make sure no one did exactly what she was doing now. But he didn’t comport himself like a guard, and he wasn’t treating her like a threat.